- Claire Fontaine
Protection
Jeanne’s life described by Guy de Maupassant in his first novel, Une vie, seems marked by a continuous misunderstanding of the concept of protection. This sensation emerges while taking into account the historical and social context in which the narration was conceived and that it refers to, clearly distant from today’s life and based on very different conventions and rules from the current ones. In fact, through the admirable narration of the French author, the theme in question unfolds in all its inherent ambiguity, regardless of the places and times described in the text, confirming the absolute relevance of Maupassant’s work and its subject matter. The book narrates the existence of the protagonist marked, from youth to old age, by uncertain, sometimes enigmatic relationships with the people around her, primarily her father, husband and son. Relationships where the semantic value of the term “protection” fluctuates constantly between the more positive sense of the term (taking care, giving comfort, repairing things and people in order to defend them from what could cause them damage …. in reference both to the human being or to nature) and (the adult subject, a designated tutor…) who decides the fate of others, individuals or nature: in short, a sort of patriarchy where the act of custody, even if motivated by the best intentions, easily changes into possession, dominion, mastery. The contents of Une vie, revised and updated, seem to come alive in the works presented by Claire Fontaine for today’s exhibition.
The self-defined “collective artist”, founded in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, in fact has always been reflecting on universal themes such as politics, religion, violence, gender disparities, the role of women within the social context, through a variety of formal languages: sculpture, drawing, photography, writing, installations, videos, performances…
Claire Fontaine, who has already dealt with this topic (for example with Patriarchy = CO2 or Patriarchy kills love, both works from 2020), states, “we imagine protection as a charitable gesture towards the weakest, instead it might keep them from progressing and prevent them from facing the world, whilst not allowing the world itself to develop the compassion necessary for different life forms to enrich us. Protection is the central idea of patriarchy: love as a dependency not only emotional but psychological and economic, so that the control of the loved ones becomes disabling and makes them increasingly dependent. In the text Women raise the upraising, we have theorized that motherhood isn’t a form of protection, but a science of emancipation and self-abolition as a figure of care and dependency. The mother’s goal in fact is to become superfluous as a mother in order to emancipate her sons and daughters, if she doesn’t succeed in doing so it means that she has failed her work of care. Protection is at the heart of the mafia’s vocabulary precisely because mafia – as a patriarchal organization par excellence – promises protection from itself, in fact those who break the pact supposed to protect them, find themselves exposed to the revenge of the very people who had offered to keep them safe”. This resonates with the works presented in the exhibition, from different periods and in various media, conceptually and visually connected with each other by Newsfloor (Il Manifesto) (2018). The installation, made of newspaper sheets, completely covers the floor of the exhibition space; the visitors, stepping on it, on both the news about everyday life and the work of art, contributes to indirectly redefine its meaning and to call into question its sacrality.
Untitled (Protector) and Untitled (It’s only 4 degrees) are two lightboxes from 2018 belonging to the series of “fractured” lightboxes in which the cracks are an integral part of the image. The first one reproduces a medieval miniature where a woman takes refuge in the arms of a devil, the second, a thermal image of the earth. They are accompanied by Passe-Partout (Palermo) (2018-20), an assemblage of lock-picks and other tools intended to open inaccessible or private places, unexplored structures and, in a metaphorical sense, to reveal mysteries of another nature, such as those related to the artistic creation and the intellectual exercise. The three works evoke, each in its own way, an idea of enforced support, of unsolicited and violently imposed help: the equivocal and elusive one of the demon to the girl; the often evoked but never realized one of humanity to nature; the one of criminal and mafia organizations to the civil society.
A virtual dialogue with other artists is the basis of two other artworks, Untitled (Don’t fix it) (2018) and Protect me from what I don’t want (2020-23). They too develop the concept of guardianship, one in a figurative sense, the other on a verbal level. The first is a lightbox that reproduces Marcel Duchamp’s Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, better known as Le Grand Verre, and, on the surface, multiplies the cracks already existing on Duchamp’s original sculpture (during a transport, the two glass plates of which the work is composed broke. The damage was discovered only later and the author wanted the lesions to remain visible considering them a chance intervention). As Claire Fontaine states “in our quote from Le Grand Verre the cracks are redoubled by the fractures of the irreparable that constitutes the key idea of the series of the ‘broken’ lightboxes – screens that are neither interactive nor active, almost a simulacrum of a screen that is out of order but still illuminated, a warning about the future that awaits us”. The other is a tribute to the truism expressed by Jenny Holzer in her homologous motto and develops in the form of a luminous work which, compositionally, recalls the phrase Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free) placed at the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The semantic articulation of the concept of protection in this context (from oneself, from others, from what the social context offers or imposes) is emphasized by the light that the author often adopts as a means of seducing the viewer, touching every sensorial sphere – intellectual, perceptive, physical/environmental – to bring them to reflect on the relationship between individuals and the ethical and relational codes, for example, the verbal or visual ones, that are conventionally used.
Liber* Tutt* (2023) is another luminous artwork which Claire Fontaine describes as “a hymn to liberation from what Foucault calls in What is Enlightenment? the state of the minority of humankind, an invitation to get rid of the symbolic master father and live a life free even from gender stereotypes that are the first ones to constrain us in every situation”.
With this work the exhibition closes – or opens, depending on the sense of the visit – and here the characters and situations outlined by Maupassant in Une vie come to mind, perceiving how the notion of rescue, the true leitmotiv of the text, crosses the narration, constantly changing circumstances and interpreters. Therefore, Jeanne from being the “object” of the sometimes obsessive, sometimes short-sighted attentions of her father, Baron Simone-Jacques Le Perthuis, and of the sometimes despotic, sometimes deceptive attentions of her husband, the Viscount Julien de Lamare, is transformed, in turn, into the “subject” of care now inconsiderate now inexperienced towards his son, Paul … and so on: in an exponential solution the combination of help and patriarchy affects all the characters in the book, from the maid Rosalie to Aunt Lisette to her little niece, impacting, yesterday as today, on everyone’s existence, as Claire Fontaine reminds us.
Pier Paolo Pancotto
Jeanne’s life described by Guy de Maupassant in his first novel, Une vie, seems marked by a continuous misunderstanding of the concept of protection. This sensation emerges while taking into account the historical and social context in which the narration was conceived and that it refers to, clearly distant from today’s life and based on very different conventions and rules from the current ones. In fact, through the admirable narration of the French author, the theme in question unfolds in all its inherent ambiguity, regardless of the places and times described in the text, confirming the absolute relevance of Maupassant’s work and its subject matter. The book narrates the existence of the protagonist marked, from youth to old age, by uncertain, sometimes enigmatic relationships with the people around her, primarily her father, husband and son. Relationships where the semantic value of the term “protection” fluctuates constantly between the more positive sense of the term (taking care, giving comfort, repairing things and people in order to defend them from what could cause them damage …. in reference both to the human being or to nature) and (the adult subject, a designated tutor…) who decides the fate of others, individuals or nature: in short, a sort of patriarchy where the act of custody, even if motivated by the best intentions, easily changes into possession, dominion, mastery. The contents of Une vie, revised and updated, seem to come alive in the works presented by Claire Fontaine for today’s exhibition.
The self-defined “collective artist”, founded in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, in fact has always been reflecting on universal themes such as politics, religion, violence, gender disparities, the role of women within the social context, through a variety of formal languages: sculpture, drawing, photography, writing, installations, videos, performances…
Claire Fontaine, who has already dealt with this topic (for example with Patriarchy = CO2 or Patriarchy kills love, both works from 2020), states, “we imagine protection as a charitable gesture towards the weakest, instead it might keep them from progressing and prevent them from facing the world, whilst not allowing the world itself to develop the compassion necessary for different life forms to enrich us. Protection is the central idea of patriarchy: love as a dependency not only emotional but psychological and economic, so that the control of the loved ones becomes disabling and makes them increasingly dependent. In the text Women raise the upraising, we have theorized that motherhood isn’t a form of protection, but a science of emancipation and self-abolition as a figure of care and dependency. The mother’s goal in fact is to become superfluous as a mother in order to emancipate her sons and daughters, if she doesn’t succeed in doing so it means that she has failed her work of care. Protection is at the heart of the mafia’s vocabulary precisely because mafia – as a patriarchal organization par excellence – promises protection from itself, in fact those who break the pact supposed to protect them, find themselves exposed to the revenge of the very people who had offered to keep them safe”. This resonates with the works presented in the exhibition, from different periods and in various media, conceptually and visually connected with each other by Newsfloor (Il Manifesto) (2018). The installation, made of newspaper sheets, completely covers the floor of the exhibition space; the visitors, stepping on it, on both the news about everyday life and the work of art, contributes to indirectly redefine its meaning and to call into question its sacrality.
Untitled (Protector) and Untitled (It’s only 4 degrees) are two lightboxes from 2018 belonging to the series of “fractured” lightboxes in which the cracks are an integral part of the image. The first one reproduces a medieval miniature where a woman takes refuge in the arms of a devil, the second, a thermal image of the earth. They are accompanied by Passe-Partout (Palermo) (2018-20), an assemblage of lock-picks and other tools intended to open inaccessible or private places, unexplored structures and, in a metaphorical sense, to reveal mysteries of another nature, such as those related to the artistic creation and the intellectual exercise. The three works evoke, each in its own way, an idea of enforced support, of unsolicited and violently imposed help: the equivocal and elusive one of the demon to the girl; the often evoked but never realized one of humanity to nature; the one of criminal and mafia organizations to the civil society.
A virtual dialogue with other artists is the basis of two other artworks, Untitled (Don’t fix it) (2018) and Protect me from what I don’t want (2020-23). They too develop the concept of guardianship, one in a figurative sense, the other on a verbal level. The first is a lightbox that reproduces Marcel Duchamp’s Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, better known as Le Grand Verre, and, on the surface, multiplies the cracks already existing on Duchamp’s original sculpture (during a transport, the two glass plates of which the work is composed broke. The damage was discovered only later and the author wanted the lesions to remain visible considering them a chance intervention). As Claire Fontaine states “in our quote from Le Grand Verre the cracks are redoubled by the fractures of the irreparable that constitutes the key idea of the series of the ‘broken’ lightboxes – screens that are neither interactive nor active, almost a simulacrum of a screen that is out of order but still illuminated, a warning about the future that awaits us”. The other is a tribute to the truism expressed by Jenny Holzer in her homologous motto and develops in the form of a luminous work which, compositionally, recalls the phrase Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free) placed at the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The semantic articulation of the concept of protection in this context (from oneself, from others, from what the social context offers or imposes) is emphasized by the light that the author often adopts as a means of seducing the viewer, touching every sensorial sphere – intellectual, perceptive, physical/environmental – to bring them to reflect on the relationship between individuals and the ethical and relational codes, for example, the verbal or visual ones, that are conventionally used.
Liber* Tutt* (2023) is another luminous artwork which Claire Fontaine describes as “a hymn to liberation from what Foucault calls in What is Enlightenment? the state of the minority of humankind, an invitation to get rid of the symbolic master father and live a life free even from gender stereotypes that are the first ones to constrain us in every situation”.
With this work the exhibition closes – or opens, depending on the sense of the visit – and here the characters and situations outlined by Maupassant in Une vie come to mind, perceiving how the notion of rescue, the true leitmotiv of the text, crosses the narration, constantly changing circumstances and interpreters. Therefore, Jeanne from being the “object” of the sometimes obsessive, sometimes short-sighted attentions of her father, Baron Simone-Jacques Le Perthuis, and of the sometimes despotic, sometimes deceptive attentions of her husband, the Viscount Julien de Lamare, is transformed, in turn, into the “subject” of care now inconsiderate now inexperienced towards his son, Paul … and so on: in an exponential solution the combination of help and patriarchy affects all the characters in the book, from the maid Rosalie to Aunt Lisette to her little niece, impacting, yesterday as today, on everyone’s existence, as Claire Fontaine reminds us.
Pier Paolo Pancotto
Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004. Since the autumn of 2017 she lives and works in Palermo, Sicily.
After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a readymade artist and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art and
life today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the human strike. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004. Since the autumn of 2017 she lives and works in Palermo, Sicily.
After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a readymade artist and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art and
life today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the human strike. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
- Thameur Mejri
- David Schnell
